Finally, some thoughts on systemic development

This sequence of pictures illustrates the notion of scalability in railways.
Clearly, the genetic technology Coupling plays an important role, but
there is more to it than that. The 20000 tonne trains shown evolved from
4000 tonne trains with head end power: Simply adding more rolling stock
to an existing system does not cut it. Sometimes, systemic discontinuities
get in the way of incrementally optimizing complex systems, and it may
even be necessary to reconfigure a system to facilitate progress from
an existing level of optimization to a higher level. A project to retrofit
the operation shown here with networked braking and distributed power
control is underway: This will once more relax existing systemic constraints,
and so open a challenge to exploit the potential of a new system configuration.
Railway Corporate Strategy CC has capability to work in this subset of
Strategic Intent.